Saveur Saturday – Homemade Tater Tots

You know when you buy the cookbook from your FAVOURITE restaurant?  Once home, you crack the spine and turn immediately to the index to find your FAVOURITE dish from said FAVOURITE restaurant.  After scanning the recipe and making a list, you head to the store to buy that 1 obscure ingredient in the recipe that you’ll probably never use again — anything for authenticity, right?

Back in the kitchen, you do an hours worth of prep, then, after pausing for a glass of wine because this is really a lot more work than you had intended to do, you get back to work, using every bowl and whisk in the house as you follow the chef’s instructions to the letter.

Three (more like four) hours after you began, and with a Himalayan-sized dish pile behind you, you plonk yourself down at the table with your creation.  First taste?  Mmmm, good.  Second? Yeah, it’s good, but there’s something missing here.  By the end of the plate, you figure the chef must’ve left the secret ingredient out, because it’s not quite the same, and really, who wants to make that dish at home, anyway?  Wouldn’t you rather pick up the tab and leave them the dishes?

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Saveur Saturday – Turkish Lahmacun

If this is Turkish pizza, then why haven’t I been to Istanbul?

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Saveur Saturday – Patatas Bravas

A declaration:  Saveur is my favourite food magazine.  The Economist still tops my list as best periodical (where else in North America can you read about the political workings of Belarus?) — but when it comes to food, Saveur is my bomb, so to say.

I’ve read some complaints that Saveur’s recipes are full of hard-to-source ingredients, but as someone who has a ridiculously large collection of  obscure spices and an almost pathological reluctance to follow any recipe exactly, I find that my well-stocked pantry and need to improvise can conquer even the most esoteric ingredient that my beloved mag throws my way.

Besides, Saveur publishes all of their recipes online, free of charge.  Which means that I don’t have to break a copyright in order for you to see the recipe and know what the hell I’m talking about.

And with that, we begin our first Saveur Saturday — with a recipe that has eluded me for 2 decades…

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